Asylum--Chapter Nine Riches

Chapter Nine
Riches

In late September I got on a flight to Fairbanks. Thomas picked me up for the over three-hour drive to Taiga. Leaving the city, we drove through low hills covered in golden birch and aspen that stood out sharply against the dark spruce trees. When the Alaska Range finally came into view, I almost started bouncing in my seat at the sight of the bulky shape of 20,000-foot Denali towering above the foothills.

“Look, look, look!” I exclaimed, and Thomas, who was fiddling with the CD player, glanced out the window and laughed at my reaction. He was enormously pleased, as if he had molded the mountain precisely to my specifications—massive, snow-covered, magnificent.

As we drove, I told Thomas I was writing an article about John McPhee’s classic book on Alaska, Coming into the Country. The Anchorage newspaper was interested in publishing it, and I needed to go back to Eagle to interview people I hadn’t got a chance to talk to while I was there in the spring. This was all true. 

Thomas was reluctant for us to spend any time apart after our month-long separation. It was a lot to ask of him—I’d be gone for five days out of a two-week-long trip because I would have to spend the night in Tok both going there and returning because it took another nine hours to get to Eagle once I’d reached Fairbanks. I knew that Thomas prioritized professional obligations over personal, so it did not surprise me when he agreed to my plan, disappointed though he was.

I’d be staying in the same cabin as last spring, I told him. But that was a lie. I would be at Billy’s. But the bigger lie, which I told myself, was that I could stay at his cabin and remain just friends. I was in love with the man, and yet I wanted to believe I could keep that love within bounds. I had to—if I was going to be able to stay married—which I very much desired. It didn’t matter anyway, I told myself, because Billy had already said that my feelings for him were not wholly reciprocated. He explained that the only reason he’d felt safe enough to ask me—a strange woman—to go down the river in his canoe was that I was married. 

Thomas pulled the car over at an overlook beside the Nenana River which ran parallel to the highway just north of Denali National Park. We read the roadside marker about the natural features of the Alaska Range and Denali, flanked by Mt. Foraker and Mt. Hunter. The deep, fast-flowing, and gray-ish Nenana held none of the majesty of the Yukon River. The wind kicked up silt from the riverbank and I turned my face away. 

“They say it’s always windy around Taiga. Sorry. I know you don’t like wind.”

Thomas was right. I had a particular aversion to wind. It was the first indication that perhaps I wasn’t going to like this small town that was to be my home come the following June. I later found out that Antler Creek, which we passed along the way, was often the windiest place in the state.

We drove over Broad Pass, the Chulitna River below us flowing north. Here were familiar autumnal hues, though not up in trees but low to the ground on brilliant brush and orange lichen-covered rocks. Despite my thrill with the landscape surrounding Taiga, the town itself, I had to admit, was rather depressing. The tourist shops, burger joint, and motel—all closed for the winter now—gave the town a deserted air. The first thing Thomas did was drive us by the school, an ugly building that stood on pilings to protect it from the ever-shifting of the permafrost beneath it. There were two wings, one for kindergarten through sixth grade and the other for middle school through high school. The fact that my husband had a secure teaching job in a real school after all these years was a gratifying thought.

Driving through the short stretch of town, we turned onto a gravel road and pulled up in front of a small house painted ranger station green. Thomas threw open the door proudly, happy he had finally been able to give me something I had always wanted—a house in the woods. Birch trees crowded the building on all sides, and Thomas had made the dim living room darker by nailing blankets over the windows so the sunlight wouldn’t glare against the TV and computer screens. The two-bedroom house was almost empty.

Thomas slept on the floor on a pile of blankets in front of the TV on which he watched videos rented at the gas station-video store. Aside from a lamp, a fan, and a few pots and pans, that was it. Imagining the place furnished with the antiques that filled my apartment was somewhat reassuring, but my initial reaction was that this was a dark and gloomy place. Thomas turned to me, hugged and kissed me, and said, “Welcome to our new home.”

After spending the night in the Mush-on-Inn in Tok, I set off on the Taylor Highway for Eagle. It was my first time driving across the mountains on the narrow road that dead-ends at the Yukon River in Eagle. In a state full of bad roads, the Taylor Highway is known as one of the worst. I didn’t know that at the time, and I drove unaware of the dangers. It was only later the highway became something to fear. As it was, I unthinkingly sailed over the humps where the frost had heaved the road’s surface into rollercoaster waves.

The pavement ended at Mosquito Fork, and the road became rutted and potholed, with long sections of washboard. It was worn down to bedrock in places, and I had to crawl along at twenty-five miles an hour. I’d come to find out later that this last stretch of the Taylor Highway was once nicknamed “the goat trail.” Full of twists and turns and blind corners, it occasionally butted up against unstable cliffs marked “slide area,” with rocks and dirt spilled across both lanes. I crept over the mounds of dirt, half expecting them to slide again, sending my car right over the precipice. Sometimes the road narrowed to one lane, the other half of it having sloughed off down the mountainside. On a shaded slope, I hit a patch of ice where a spring flowed across the road. As the car sheered sideways, I didn't care if I went sailing right off the escarpment and down to the creek far below, not caring if I left this world, if I lived or died. There was Billy and there was Thomas, a pull toward Eagle and an obligation to go to Taiga. There seemed no way to reconcile these opposites in my heart. 

In a couple of weeks, the Taylor Highway would be closed for the winter. I drove for hours without seeing a single vehicle. At the top of American Summit, the third such high mountain I had climbed, the woods dispersed and the landscape opened out. The number of trees dwindled until there was only an occasional spindly black spruce, stunted by permafrost, standing just twelve or sixteen feet tall. In these far northern latitudes, the tree line is at three thousand feet; above that the spruce gave way to rock outcroppings and buck-brush, a knee-high bush in its autumnal color of dried blood. I stopped and got out of the car. The wind-swept summit allowed a 365-degree view of mountain ridge upon mountain ridge as far as I could see. All in a rush, love for Alaska flooded me, and I felt a renewed sense of hope that things would work out. It was not just a decision I had to make between two men.  What was at stake was something more: What kind of life would I choose for myself?

When the odometer told me I must be near Eagle, I stopped and changed my clothes behind a large rock, putting on a long denim skirt and a soft red sweater. I washed the road dust from my face with water from my drinking bottle and smoothed on geranium-scented lotion before combing my hair and applying lip gloss. I looked at myself in the rear view mirror, hair smoothed, lips glossed. Friends . . . who was I kidding? When I’d emailed Moana to tell her of my travel plans, she wrote, “I have a hard time believing there is any chance you will remain just pals with your friend Billy while visiting him, but you never know. Stranger things have happened, I’m sure, but I can’t think of one of them.” I could hear her laughter from here. 

I walked nervously up the path to Billy’s cabin. I knew that in Eagle, people dropped in on their friends and neighbors all the time. Calling ahead was unnecessary, but it was polite to signal your arrival before approaching the house. Usually this was not necessary because the ever-present dogs started barking, or visitors came by noisy ATV or snowmachine.

I’d honked the horn when I drove into the driveway but didn’t get a response, so I half-expected Billy not to be home. I entered the arctic entry and knocked lightly on the door. To my surprise, the heavy wooden door swung open and there stood Billy. Before I could say anything, he stepped back to show me there was someone else in the room—a Native man who regarded me with surprise bordering on astonishment. In a place where people seldom expressed open curiosity, it was written all over the man’s face.

I stuck out my hand awkwardly, but Billy engulfed me in a great hug that lasted a long time. He introduced me to his neighbor, Sherman, who made his exit, but only after lingering for a while, apparently hoping for an explanation as to where I’d come from and what I was doing there. He got neither, and left looking as if he believed I must have parachuted in from Outside.

After he was gone, Billy and I approached each other tentatively. I leaned into him and whispered, “Hello, friend.”

 “Hello, friend,” he answered, and pulled me close. We stood this way for a long, long time, with my face against his neck, breathing in his smell of smoke and wool, and something both slightly animal and very masculine. He breathed in the scent of my hair, his hands against my back, clasping me to him. He moved his hands from one part of my body to another and pressed me to him again—as if feeling over and over the reality of me, the way a toddler pats his mother to make sure she is still there. He didn’t kiss me. I didn’t know if I wanted him to or not.

I’d been on the road a long time, so I excused myself and went behind the cabin to the outhouse at the edge of the clearing. Nothing more than a lean-to without a door, it was a surprisingly pleasant place to sit, surrounded by golden birch and aspen trees. Even though it lacked a door, I had never been in a bathroom that felt more private than this one tucked at the edge of the woods. On the path back to the cabin, I took my time and looked around. Laundry was drying on a clothesline strung between two trees: an army-green wool sweater with a couple of fist-sized holes in the front; an Iditarod T-shirt from 1985; two camo shirts; a pair of heavy firefighter’s pants; several flannel shirts; and a dozen grayish misshapen socks. Beneath the eaves, a metal rain barrel teetered on three uneven legs alongside a set of moose antlers. An old oak barrel held an assortment of weatherworn hoes, shovels, and rakes. In front of the cabin, an ax was stuck into a stump next to a stack of firewood, and two saws leaned against a rickety sawhorse.

Back inside, I joined Billy on the couch, and we sat together, holding hands, lapsing into companionable silence. I felt incredibly comfortable in his presence, considering how little we had actually seen of each other the previous spring.

I noted the similarities and differences between my grandparents’ cabin on Thimbleberry Island, as she had described in her journals, and Billy’s cabin. They each had an enamel-topped cookstove. Both lacked many things I took for granted, such as drawers and closets and cupboards; instead there were shelves and trunks and old wooden boxes. When Scotty had finally built her a drawer, Smokey was so pleased she "almost bawled"—at last she had a place to stow things away from the inescapable wood smoke. In both cabins, the floors were plywood, and the bedrooms contained an army cot and a homemade bed. Smokey’s night table had been an orange crate covered with gingham. Billy’s was a handmade chair, painted yellow, which he’d found in a prospector’s cabin.

I felt my grandmother, of all people, would have understood the draw that had brought me north, what was leading me onward still. Smokey had been as fascinated by the people of Alaska as much as by the land and the wildlife. Like me, she had wanted to learn everything she could about the strangers she met. While in Sitka, I’d talked to one of Scotty’s grandsons, who had spent much time with my grandparents when he was a boy. He’d remarked, “I hear a lot of Grandma Smokey in you—the way you put things together verbally, the way you ask questions—you're good at it. Smokey was a very curious person, too, but not to the point of being intrusive. She was someone you wanted to talk to, not to please her, but because she was genuinely interested in you.” I was delighted he thought I was, in some way at least, like the grandmother I admired so much. 

It was at Liz’s ranch that I first felt the need to prove myself as Smokey had. I, who had been raised to think of myself as weak, was encouraged by my friend to work my courage like a muscle, taking on small challenges and facing down my fears of horses and the river whirlpools capable of swallowing a boat. It was gumption she was trying to develop in me—the ability to “stand up to the rock,” as the Idaho pioneers used to say.

I admired Liz’s practical skills, whether rounding up cattle, rebuilding a decrepit barn, or fixing a tractor. Although these were not things I wished to do myself, they spoke of a competence and confidence I longed to have. Liz gave a dismissive snort when I commented on her ability to heft ninety-pound bales of hay, saying it was a lot harder in the old days when people didn’t have tractors and other farm machinery. Her eighty-something father told me about life in the 1930s before the dams were built, blocking the Chinook salmons’ yearly return. Salmon were so plentiful then that they even fed them to their hogs, though it gave them a fishy taste. Huge sturgeon lurked in the depths of the river, and bighorn sheep and black bears roamed the mountains that rose behind the winter pasture. There were homesteads up and down the Snake River during the Depression. Resourcefulness and self-sufficiency were essential, and people made their own entertainment. They’d come for miles by mule to dance all night in the old schoolhouse where Liz’s father now lived.

The ranch seemed remote to me because the road I drove down from Pullman was on the Washington side of the river and the only way to get to the ranchhouse was to row across to the Idaho side. In spring, sometimes Liz and her father couldn’t cross to the road because the swollen river swept along chunks of ice and entire trees. Despite the occasional scary situation I found myself in when I was there, I always left the ranch reluctantly, hungry for the closeness to the land I felt when we lingered by the river long into the evening as bats dodged and swooped and nighthawks gave their sharp, electric calls. But the Snake River canyon was hot and dry, and I felt the pull of the north, where more than just a river separated people from the outside world.

I noticed Billy’s ancient billfold sitting on a ledge above the stove. It was slim compared to Thomas’s wallet, which bulged with every driver’s license he’d ever had, as well as a naked photo of me in my twenties. Occasionally when getting out some cash, I looked at the licenses, seeing the changes over the years, searching for early signs of the autism that was to cause such stress in our marriage. All I saw was a man I had loved throughout the years, despite everything.

When I asked Billy if I could look inside the billfold, he said he didn’t mind at all. I’d always thought you could learn a lot about a person by examining the contents of their wallet. The first thing I pulled out was an expired state I.D. card. “You’re only four years younger than I am.”

He seemed relieved at this, as I was. We had dodged the issue of our relative ages. I was very conscious I looked my age of forty-six, while he looked at least ten years younger. “You don’t have a driver’s license?”

 “No, a lot of people in Eagle don’t.” 

 “Why not?”

 “You don’t really need one. The closest state troopers are in Tok. Besides, my truck wouldn’t make it all the way there to take the driving test.” 

 “So I suppose your truck isn’t registered either?”

 “No.”

 “Insured?”
 “No.”

The almost-empty wallet contained no cash, no credit card, no ATM card, no voter registration card, not even a library card. (At the Eagle library, he explained, you just write down your name on the checkout card.) Billy said he got along fine without a bank account, health insurance, or a retirement pension. He’d quit his firefighting job in his thirties, reluctant to be gone from Eagle during the summer anymore. He wanted to garden, get a couple of dogs, settle into the homestead he had dreamed of since he was a boy. Since then he had mostly just fished, hunted, and trapped—the true subsistence lifestyle. When he needed money he did odd jobs for people, cutting firewood and working as a packer on mountain sheep hunting trips for a local guide. Like everyone in town, he also bartered a lot, trading a box of .22 shells for a duck for dinner or old truck parts for a used chain saw.

Despite his lack of a regular job, Billy did not have any debt. On the rare occasions when he needed to borrow money, he got it from the gas station owner who functioned as the banker in town, cashing money orders and making small loans. Billy owned his cabin and land free and clear and paid no taxes. (He had too little income to declare for federal taxes, and there is neither a state income tax nor a local property tax.) He hadn’t even applied for the Permanent Fund Dividend for the past ten years—the money (averaging a thousand dollars) paid to each Alaska resident every year from the state’s profits from the oil companies—because he believed his signature on the application constituted a de facto registration for the draft.

I pulled out a sharp little instrument like a folding X-Acto knife.

“What’s this?”

“A P-thirty-eight.”

I looked at him blankly. 

“A can opener. Military issue. They work really well.”

The billfold also contained a copy of his birth certificate, nearly worn through at the folds. Tucked into a pocket was a piece of paper with a needle stuck through it and a length of thread wrapped around it. 

“Why a needle and thread?” His clothes were in need of patching, but the little packet didn’t look like it had been put to use recently.

“You know, a needle used to be highly valued by the Eskimos because without it, if you were ever in a survival situation, you couldn’t repair your clothes and then you’d be up a creek—”

“Without a needle and thread,” I laughed. Here was a man, in his shabby clothes and barebones cabin, who thinks this is what constitutes riches: needle and thread. I reached over and stroked his cheek. He smiled and ducked his head, suddenly shy again.

 “How about some lunch?” Billy said.

He heated up a can of corned beef hash and retrieved a huge turnip he’d pulled from the garden the week before and stored in the root cellar. I was both fascinated and repelled by the root cellar—a glorified name for nothing more than a hole in the ground beneath a trap door next to the sink. Billy took a flashlight and disappeared down a ladder. He shone the flashlight around while I knelt on the floor above and peered into the depths. There were no shelves, simply a couple of cardboard boxes filled with 

purple turnips. Soon, he said, he’d have the potatoes down there, too.

“Some years, the voles can get pretty bad. They’ll eat their way right into a big turnip and make themselves at home.”

I imagined a vole—I’d seen one last spring in my cabin, and they were sweet, mouse-like creatures—curled in a hollowed-out turnip, snoozing the winter away. But seeing a vole scurry across the floor was different than having one burrow its way into your critical foodstores.

After lunch, we went for a walk in the woods with the two huskies. They were glad to be off their chains, and I was happy to be out of the car after the long drive. As we left the cabin, Billy had taken a rifle off the rack and swung it casually over his shoulder.

I must have looked surprised because he said, “I never go into the woods without being prepared.”

We saw moose droppings, but no sign of bear. Billy’s opinion, shared by many in Alaska, was that coming suddenly on a moose could be just as dangerous as meeting a bear. I’d heard of a student who’d been stomped to death by a moose on the University of Alaska campus in Anchorage.

The moss beneath the trees that had been emerald green in spring was now darker, a loden green, with filigrees of caribou moss rising out of it. Billy pulled up a piece of the delicate plant and held it to my nose. 

“Doesn’t that smell like corn silk?”

I hadn’t even remembered corn silk had a scent, but he was right. The wildflowers were gone, but a few red berries still hung on the bushes. Highbush cranberries, Billy said. They had a musky, unpleasant smell but they made good jelly. He plucked a few narrow leaves from a bush, crushed them in his hand and held them—sharp and pungent—to my nose.

“Labrador tea. It tastes good, and if you have a sore throat, it really helps.”

Nicky and Smokey flushed a spruce grouse ahead of us. The bird had been foraging on the forest floor with a distracted air, like someone who’d dropped something amongst the leaves. Billy stopped and used the knife on his belt to pry a chunk of dried pitch from the trunk of a spruce tree. To my surprise, he popped it into this mouth and started working it like a stiff piece of chewing gum.

“How does it taste?”
“Not too bad, but it makes your mouth water a lot. Want to try it?”

I declined.

We emerged from the trees onto a clearing full of strange plants that stood on necklike stumps and were covered with grass like shaggy hair.

“Tussocks,” said Billy.

They were spaced unevenly, a foot or two apart, and at first I stepped from one to another, but they were wobbly, and I slipped off into the soggy meadow, getting my feet wet. 

Billy grabbed my hand to steady me. “They’re a pain to walk on.” He wove around the tussocks, squelching through the soaked moss and grass beneath his feet.

“Imagine trying to run through a field of these when you’re fighting a fire.”

I couldn’t imagine it, any more than I could contemplate willingly working sixteen-hour days battling flames in the summer heat. 

We slogged along for a few more yards before we turned back because my wet feet were getting cold. When we got to the cabin, Billy took the softened spruce pitch out of his mouth, melted it with a lighter and shoved it into a screw hole on his gunstock to make the hole small enough to take the screw.

A truck pulled into the driveway and we heard a shout. It was Sherman, come to investigate the strange woman he’s seen earlier that day. He was all smiles and said he’d come to invite us over for dinner. Typically, Billy said later, he meant right then, at that moment. We pulled on our coats and followed Sherman out.

When we entered his house, a rich, thick aroma enveloped us. In the kitchen, Sherman’s wife, Lynn, was pulling what I assumed would be a turkey from the oven, but it turned out to be a whole caribou head. No wonder the smell had an unfamiliar note to it. The head looked both tasty—all brown and roasted—and repulsive at the same time. She urged me to try a bit, and I pulled a piece of meat from the cheek. As rich and fatty as it smelled, it tasted delicious. Lynn decided it needed ten more minutes and put the head back in the oven. In the living room, where Sherman and Billy were watching TV,  Lynn returned to beading a moosehide moccasin. I exclaimed over the intricacy of the beading and the exquisite design of wild roses and trailing vines. She seemed pleased and showed me a beaded belt, meticulously done, which must have taken many, many hours to complete. 

I thought of the Belgian linguist I’d met the previous spring, who was working with two elders in the Native village to create a dictionary of the Han language before it disappeared entirely. There were only about eight people who spoke it fluently, and they were all over age sixty. It must be a strange feeling to know your language is on the brink of extinction, losing terms irreplaceable in English, including a single word that conveyed not only that you threw something, but also the object’s shape and size. Saying these long dormant words out loud had brought back memories the women hadn’t thought of for years, and they strayed from discussing grammar to telling stories about growing up in the village.

In the decades since those women were children, the Native Village of Eagle had shrunk to only about thirty people, with many members of the tribe living in Fairbanks and elsewhere. But people like Lynn refused to let their culture die, and they held a subsistence potlatch every winter in the community hall by the river, feasting on moose soup, caribou, and fry bread. Instead of traditional dances, today someone might bring out a fiddle and they’d jig the way their ancestors had learned long ago from the fur traders. They’d developed their own unique style of fiddle playing, and it had become their new tradition. 

During dinner, Sherman, looked back and forth between Billy and me, his eyes full of questions, before finally asking why I was in Eagle. I’m writing a book about Alaska, I said for simplicity’s sake.

 “Billy, he’s a good man for teaching you about Alaska,” Sherman said.

A bit later, we said our goodbyes and walked home. As we sat on the couch with cups of after-dinner tea, I started talking about my grandparents’ years on Thimbleberry Island. Billy displayed only a mild interest. Bush life was old news to him. He perked up whenever I told him one of Scotty’s stories, which were often about hunting and adventures of all kinds, like the time he was chased by a pack of wolves, and another time had been stranded on an island for months with little food. Now Billy gave me his whole attention. 

“One time a black bear swam to the island and kept coming around the cabin. Scotty couldn’t scare off, so he finally shot it. They sent the hide to Ketchikan to be tanned and then mailed it to us. It hung over the back of the couch in the living room for years. I loved bragging to people that my grandpa shot the bear, but it was kind of silly, because, minus the head and legs, it was hardly bigger than a bathmat. 

“Yearlings can be dangerous, too,” Billy assured me. “I had one up a tree in the yard last spring. It didn’t come down for the longest time because the dogs kept barking.”

He also liked hearing about the time Scotty came home empty-handed on the first day of deer season, not long after he’d headed up to the top of the island to hunt. He was moaning about being an old man. Smokey tried to console him, saying he couldn’t expect to bag a deer in a mere three hours, and there was still plenty of time before the season closed. “Oh, I got my deer all right,” he’d said, “I just couldn’t pack him out because his antlers kept getting tangled in the brush.” He went back later, cut off the head and left it by the trail, and easily packed the rest home on his shoulders. Scotty then taught Smokey to can venison on the wood stove, a labor-intensive job that left her exhausted but with a deep feeling of satisfaction about all the meat in their cache—a little cabin up on stilts that kept the game safe from other animals. Billy nodded. Now there was something he could understand.